Comments on: Just Waiting For Our Friend…

By: Ziming Han

Ziming Han — Sat, 12 May 2018 03:14:34 +0000

I am glad to hear the news that CEO of Starbucks has made an apology for the event and decide to shut down their stores to teach the employess about discrimination and racial bias. I think maybe this trainingms are not that powerful to let all employees realize their implicit racism, but it i enough to tell them what their actions will result in.

By: Mia Shmariahu

Mia Shmariahu — Fri, 11 May 2018 23:22:37 +0000

I think what changes it even more is the fact that they weren’t just waiting for their friend; they were waiting for someone to have a business meeting.
Additionally – I have concerns about the racial bias training. Starbucks has already tried to combat race in a way that was inefficient – their “Race Together” campaign turned out to be a bust. I’m also wondering where this specific racial bias training is going to go.

By: Wilhelmina Minney

Wilhelmina Minney — Tue, 08 May 2018 21:12:13 +0000

As much as I would love to have access to a neatly tied answer to your question, there simply isn’t one. With us being in a system of white supremacy, the answer is going to be complicated. I imagine the answer paralleling that of the stopping of the brutalization of Native Americans (which still go on today) back in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds: the cost of enacting white supremacy has to be greater than the benefit. In this case, because Starbucks is a business, this too large of a cost would be money or losing the entire business as a whole. It has to be a societal norm that when things like these happen, the business will either loose half of its profits or be on the way to bankruptcy with no exceptions. These racialized attacks will stop very quickly then.

By: bstarr1104

bstarr1104 — Tue, 01 May 2018 22:43:53 +0000

Really insightful post Caroline. I agree with your points and am just as disturbed by this incident. I too am wondering what this “racial bias training” will consist of. I hope that it actually will be cohesive training and that this isn’t merely a PR stunt for Starbucks. Hopefully whatever it is that they do will be applied to other nationwide establishments to eliminate the chances of this happening again.

By: Tovia Marinstein

Tovia Marinstein — Tue, 01 May 2018 21:19:19 +0000

This touches on the concept of affordances (or privileges) that are given to normative members of society based only on their group membership. In this example, white people are given the affordance of utilizing communal spaces, even when the spaces are privately owned. This example reminds me that while segregation is illegal it still exists.